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Analysis – What is the odyssey about

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Analysis – What is the odyssey about

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Like “The Iliad”, “The Odyssey” is attributed to the Greek epic poet Homer, although it was probably written later than “The Iliad”, in Homer’s mature years, possibly around 725 BCE. Also like “The Iliad”, it was clearly composed in an oral tradition, and was probably intended more to be sung than read, probably accompanied by a simple stringed instrument which was strummed for an occasional rhythmic accent. It is written in Homeric Greek (an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects such as Aeolic Greek), and comprises 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter verse, usually divided up into 24 books.

Many copies of the poem have come down to us (for example, a survey of all surviving Egyptian papyri carried out in 1963 found that nearly half of the 1,596 individual “books” were copies of “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey” or commentaries on them). There are interesting parallels between many of the elements of “The Odyssey” and the much older Sumerian legends in the “Epic of Gilgamesh”. Today, the word “odyssey” has come to be used in the English language to refer to any epic voyage or extended wandering.

As in “The Iliad”, Homer makes frequent use of “epithets” in “The Odyssey”, descriptive tags used regularly to fill out a line of verse as well as to provide detail about character, such as Odysseus “the raider of cities” and Menelaus “the red-haired captain”. The epithets, as well as repeated background stories and longer epic similes, are common techniques in the oral tradition, designed to make the job of the singer-poet a little easier, as well as to remind the audience of important background information.

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